Ambition travels further in the dark

When the then UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called energy ‘the golden thread’ that could connect economic growth, social equity, and environmental sustainability in 2012, the phrase stuck. How that pathway runs has been a research question ever since, and a recent study tested it in rural Myanmar.

The South Asian Network for Development and Environmental Economics (SANDEE) at the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) hosts the Karl-Göran Mäler (KGM) Memorial Lecture twice a year, in memory of Mäler, one of SANDEE’s founders. The June 2026 Memorial Lecture, ‘Electrifying empowerment: Evidence from Africa and Myanmar’, was delivered by Subhrendu K. Pattanayak, Oak Foundation Distinguished Professor of Environmental and Energy Policy at Duke University, during SANDEE’s 51st Research and Training Workshop in Kathmandu. Pattanayak and coauthors ask whether energy access empowers women, or whether more empowered women are the ones who adopt cleaner energy. Soumya Balasubramanya, Senior Economist at the World Bank and SANDEE Advisor, moderated the session.

Why it matters for the Hindu Kush Himalaya

ICIMOD’s 2025 renewable energy report states that around 829 million people across the Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH)1 countries still rely on traditional biomass for cooking, while over 47 million lack access to electricity. Governments, development banks, and development partners have responded through investments ranging from rural electrification to large hydropower projects. These investments are expected to provide multiple benefits: improving health, enhancing the local environment, mitigating carbon emissions, increasing household incomes, and easing women’s time burdens. But ICIMOD’s 2019 HKH assessment cautions that time saved through cleaner cooking, which reduces firewood collection time, does not necessarily become income-earning time. What energy access changes and under what conditions remain open empirical questions.

The evidence is thinner than the slogan

A 2021 systematic review by Jeuland and colleagues2 found the evidence uneven: plentiful on the health and pollution effects of cooking and fuel use, but sparse on women’s time use and empowerment. Part of the problem is direction. Cleaner energy may widen women’s options, but more empowered women are also more likely to acquire cleaner technology to begin with. The field, Pattanayak argued, has often treated this evidence as more settled than it is. His own work, therefore, goes straight at how women use their time and who holds power at home. In cookstove trials across four African countries, his team tested three methods for tracking women’s time and used household bargaining games to see who controls decisions. Both are hard to measure well, which is part of why that evidence stays inconclusive.

What the Myanmar experiment found

The Myanmar study was a randomised trial across 66 villages in southern Myanmar, half of which were off-grid solar-electrified and half were not. The intervention, edutainment (an approach that combines education and entertainment to make learning more engaging, memorable, and effective), consisted of two parts. Women listened to a 7-minute audio recording about a woman who sets a goal and achieves it, then worked through a short goal-setting exercise of their own. Across all villages, the intervention raised women’s empowerment by about 0.29 standard deviations. The gains sat in two of the five dimensions the study measured: financial agency and business agency. Treated women were more likely to hold their own savings, bank, or mobile money account, and rated their own ability to do business higher. The clearest gain was in identifying new opportunities. The overall effect held with or without access to electricity, and it was largest for women who started with the least agency.

Aspirations were another story. On average, the intervention barely moved them – income, children’s schooling, and the overall aspirations index all stayed flat. Differences appeared only once the villages were split by electrification. In unelectrified villages, women raised the schooling they hoped their children would complete by about 2 years, a shift absent in solar villages. Interest in productive appliances increased only in the dark villages, and household decisions showed the same pattern. Aspiration for education expenses, business loans, and time allocated for childcare improved in these ‘dark’ villages. And the two effects came from different women: agency gains among the least empowered, aspiration shifts among those who already had more schooling and ambition.

Why the dark, and what it means

Many of the prevailing socioeconomic conditions in these villages were not similar to begin with. Solar-electrified villages had more schools and more households that owned productive appliances or ran nonfarm businesses. Therefore, for a woman from these villages, a recorded story about her children’s schooling did not add much to aspirations she had already formed by watching her neighbours. In the unelectrified villages, however, there was less of this to see, and a longer way for a mother’s expectations to travel. The surroundings mattered more than the electricity. And in those same villages, women raised their sights even for appliances they could not yet plug in.

The study was conducted across two regions in Myanmar and spanned the COVID-19 pandemic and a political change. Current results from the study do not settle the ‘golden thread’ question, but they do give reason to doubt an assumption behind many energy programmes: that once access expands, higher aspirations will follow on their own. Based on that logic, the unelectrified villages were the last place to expect them. That makes it worth asking what a village already offers a woman before anyone spends anything there.

^[1] Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal, and Pakistan. 

^[2] Jeuland, M., Fetter, T. R., Li, Y., Pattanayak, S. K., Usmani, F., Bluffstone, R. A., ... & Toman, M. (2021). Is energy the golden thread? A systematic review of the impacts of modern and traditional energy use in low-and middle-income countries. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 135, 110406.